Rule of the Rings — why film-makers can’t resist Tolkien’s fantasy world

The history of The Lord of the Rings isn’t one of dwarves, orcs, elves, balrogs, wizards or hobbits. It’s one of legal disputes, troubled adaptations and multimillion-dollar acquisitions. Its leading players are lawyers, vociferous fans, video-game designers, novelists, tabletop role players and film producers.

Since the publication of The Return of the King — the final volume in the trilogy — in 1955, the series has, in one form or another, been at various stages of development for radio, stage, television, film or gaming. Although the BBC’s first radio version the same year was, by the standards of future efforts, a relatively placid affair, adapting The Lord of the Rings for other media has long been a fraught undertaking.

So many attempts have been made to bring a story director Stanley Kubrick regarded as “unfilmable” to the screen that the question of who exactly owns the rights to do so has been fiercely contested in court. Just as in the fictional universe of The Lord of the Rings, where every other character who comes into contact with the “One Ring” pays a terrible price, those who aspire to adapt the novels for cinema risk hefty legal bills. The 2001-03 film series alone has been the subject of lawsuits from the producer Saul Zaentz, the Weinstein brothers, the films’ director Peter Jackson and the estate of Tolkien himself.

Adapting Tolkien’s vision has defeated, variously, George Lucas, Walt Disney and The Beatles, who approached Tolkien shortly after playing themselves in A Hard Day’s Night but were rebuffed. Yet neither studios nor filmmakers seem able to resist the franchise. The latest to have a go is Amazon, whose TV series The Rings of Power — an adaptation of the books’ appendices, detailing Sauron’s rise in Middle-earth — begins airing on September 2. Amazon paid $250mn for its TV rights — almost as much, before a single scene had been scripted or shot, as Jackson spent bringing the trilogy to cinemas.

Why has so much money been spent and so much been fought over? What is it about The Lord of the Rings?

For those few who have managed to get their adaptation to air, success has been all but guaranteed. As the entertainment magazine Variety observed in 1969, when United Artists began work on what would become Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated adaptation, “with the possible exception of JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, the writer who has captivated the most college and even high-school students in the past decade apparently is JRR Tolkien”.

Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings while working as an academic at the University of Oxford: his students included Philip Larkin, one of the great English poets of the 20th century. At least as far as Larkin was concerned, Tolkien was not a great teacher or academic: the poet complained bitterly about Tolkien’s lessons in his correspondence with the novelist Kingsley Amis, also an unimpressed Tolkien pupil.

Variety’s use of the word “apparently”, whether by accident or design, reflects a broader cultural snobbery about Tolkien’s output that would surely have delighted Larkin and Amis. His success is often treated as some kind of unhappy accident, as much something to be mourned as something to celebrate.

The critic Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker, describes the “Tolkien formula” rather dismissively as “a vaguely medieval world populated by dwarfs, elves, trolls; an evil lord out to enslave the good creatures; and, almost always, a weird magic thing that will let him do it, if the hero doesn’t find or destroy it first”, adding despairingly that “of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist, fights that never happened, all set against the sort of medieval background that Mark Twain thought he had discredited with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”

It is certainly true to say that any court seeking to convict Tolkien of great literature would struggle. Unlike other fantasy authors, such as Michael Moorcock or Ursula Le Guin, his work provides little in the way of historical and political commentary. Nor will readers find characters in whom they see themselves or their own experiences, such as the schoolchildren in the Harry Potter books. Or, indeed, much in the way of deep character work at all: for the most part, existential doubt, moral complexity, sexual desire and ambiguous interpersonal relationships are in short supply in The Lord of the Rings.

But that same court would also struggle to convict Tolkien for devising the formula that Gopnik imputes to him. The concept of a chosen one travelling through a “vaguely medieval” world, aided and abetted by fantastical creatures, in search of some cosmic doodad (or, as the screenwriter and frequent Hitchcock collaborator Angus MacPhail dubbed it, “a MacGuffin”) predates Tolkien. The “Tolkien formula” can be found in various retellings of the story of the Holy Grail. To the extent that Tolkien deviates from that story, it is in the introduction of the dark lord Sauron. But, given that in The Lord of the Rings we never hear Sauron speak, he never engages the heroes directly and his motivations are, in essence, that he does evil things because he’s evil, Sauron alone can hardly be seen as a great innovation on the old story of the Holy Grail.

What, then, is Tolkien’s achievement? The important thing to understand is that Tolkien wasn’t aiming to write literature. As JA Bayona, the director of the opening two episodes of The Rings of Power, puts it, Tolkien “wanted to create something that the British didn’t have”, a mythology “like the Greeks”. Tolkien’s great achievement is as a world-builder and mythmaker. He even went so far as to create not only a detailed history for Middle-earth but also a complete language for his elves and a set of shared histories and archetypes for a whole range of fantastical creatures.

Tolkien’s enduring legacy is not in his plot devices or his setting. It is in the tropes he created, his codification of the basic rules about what, exactly, an elf, an orc or a dwarf is like. Elves are beings of great magical power and wisdom, who are immortal, barring accidents. Dwarves are craftsmen and metalworkers who live underground. Orcs are nasty and brutish (though not especially short). The trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie once observed of Louis Armstrong that “if it weren’t for him, there wouldn’t be any of us”, and the same could be said by every successful fantasy writer since Tolkien. Whether those elves are living in medieval forests in Electronic Arts’ successful video-game franchise Dragon Age or are in deep space in the tabletop game Warhammer 40,000, you can find something of Tolkien’s ageless and magical elf in them all.

Sometimes the homage is overt. Take another tabletop role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons, itself the subject of a multimillion-dollar movie adaptation, out in 2023. Its debt to Tolkien’s world was, inevitably, the subject of a lawsuit, the main consequence of which is that the word “hobbit” was dropped in favour of “halfling”. But pick up a copy of D&D’s Monster Manual and you will find graceful elves, thuggish orcs and skilled dwarven craftsmen: the world that D&D players inhabit is the world that Tolkien made.

But sometimes the Tolkien imprimatur is more subtle. George RR Martin’s unfinished series of novels, A Song of Ice and Fire — which became the glossy HBO adaptation Game of Thrones and now has a Rings of Power-type prequel of its own, House of the Dragon — derives part of its power from subverting the expectations that Tolkien’s mythology has created. Where Tolkien’s chosen king, Aragorn, marked for greatness because of his unsullied royal blood, is wise, strong and merciful, Martin’s Targaryens are likewise pure of blood — but as a result are inbred and prone to madness, violence and misrule.

Tolkien teaches us to expect sons to avenge their murdered fathers, not to be also murdered and betrayed along with most of their family. With the exception of the rather unsatisfying Night King, there are no clear goodies and baddies in Westeros, the land where Game of Thrones is set, and it is testament to the power of Tolkien’s mythmaking that once the showrunners ran out of books to adapt they lapsed back into his good-versus-evil template.

Martin’s struggles to complete A Song of Ice and Fire have become the stuff of legend among fantasy fans. When Game of Thrones was published in 1996, he planned to write a trilogy. It is now 11 years and counting since the publication of the fifth book in what Martin currently believes will be a series of seven. Ironically, while the televised adaptation’s weakest moments came with the introduction of the rather Tolkienesque Night King, Martin’s biggest struggle in completing the books has been an absence of Tolkien-style world-building.

It takes the entirety of the first book for Ned Stark, a key player in Westeros’s power games, to complete his fateful journey down south to the capital city. By the time of the third book, it sometimes appears as if either high-speed rail or the autobahn has come to Westeros, as the characters zoom about the map seemingly at will. At other times, Westeros is impossibly vast. A book about the reality of war has been defeated by that classic military obstacle, supply line difficulties, as Martin struggles to move all his characters into place across huge distances.

The presence of a detailed and consistent map is neither necessary nor sufficient to create enduring fantasy, whether it be for adults or children. Indeed, Martin would undoubtedly have been better served by abandoning any pretence that Westeros is a consistent size or shape.

The Chronicles of Narnia, the creation of Tolkien’s friend and colleague CS Lewis, has a loose grip on its size, its geography and, indeed, its history. Lewis’s purpose is instead to explore Christian ethics. His work has given rise to numerous adaptations, and other writers since, most successfully Philip Pullman in His Dark Materials, have drawn inspiration from — or reacted to — Lewis’s purpose and work. But there is no “Lewis formula”, and no film studio will ever pay the equivalent of $250mn for his appendices on Narnia, not least because there aren’t any.

The secret of Tolkien’s achievement lies in the fact that he was a fan of The Lord of the Rings before The Lord of the Rings had been written. Like so many fans, he is preoccupied with questions about the history and rules of his world, much more than he is about character and subtext. “I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit (generally with meticulous care for distances),” he once wrote. “The other way about lands one in confusions and impossibilities, and in any case it is weary work to compose a map from a story.”

That is why his work has proved so appealing to children and teenagers: at precisely the age when young readers start to ask difficult questions, such as “How many floors does Hogwarts have, exactly?”, there is Tolkien, with an answer to almost every query. He is not a writer on a par with Lewis, but his obsessive desire to make his world whole is why he has the bigger legacy.

That detailed world is one reason, too, why it has been so attractive to so many creatives. “It gives you so many possibilities as a film-maker,” Bayona says. And when you consider not only The Rings of Power but also the innumerable films, video games and television shows that are not official adaptations of The Lord of the Rings but owe a debt to it, you can see that he is right.

The $250mn gamble that Amazon made — admittedly, given the size of Amazon, not as big a gamble as it sounds — is that there is more value to be had in telling a story in Tolkien’s vast world than there is in devising new stories using the archetypes codified by Tolkien; that there is, in the end, something greater to be found in Tolkien’s appendices than there is in the work of all those authors who followed him. Whether or not that gamble pays off, Tolkien’s triumph is that anyone who reads a novel, plays a game or watches a film set in a fantastical world will, in a sense, be enjoying Tolkien.

Stephen Bush is a Financial Times associate editor and columnist

Data visualisation by Keith Fray

‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ will premiere on Prime Video on September 2

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